Text Input on a Smart Watch

Smart watches provide users with access to many applications directly from their wrists, without the need to touch their smartphones. While applications such as email, messaging, calendar, and social networking provide views on the watch, there is normally no text-entry method, so users cannot reply on the same device. Here, the authors introduce their interaction design and an optimized alphabetic layout for smart-watch text entry, and present a lab evaluation of an implemented prototype using the OpenAdaptxt engine on a Sony SmartWatch 2. While raising some problems, the feedback from study participants indicates that reasonable quality and speed is achievable on a smart watch and encourages future work in this area. This article is part of a special issue on wearable computing.